Name: French Beans Boiled
Ingredients: French beans; water; coarse sea salt; butter sauce or tarragon sauce

Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

French Beans Boiled

Ingredients

French beans
water
coarse sea salt
butter sauce or tarragon sauce

Directions

Prepare

Cut each bean into two or three pieces and place them in water as you cut.

Cook and serve

Drain the beans in a sieve.
Boil the beans in a pot of salted water until tender.
Serve the beans on a dish with butter sauce or tarragon sauce poured over them.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,799 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

French beans: Form the main body of the dish, cooking to a tender texture.
Butter sauce or tarragon sauce: Adds richness and moisture, coating the beans as they are served.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.